CURA.

A child clumsily yet carefully places animal stickers in an apocalyptic landscape; a latex-gloved hand holds the body of a baby crocodile firmly as it lifts a finger to caress the reptile’s neck; a group of people stare upward with outstretched arms, holding iPhones to record something in the sky. These vignettes, among others, appear in Camille Henrot’s In The Veins (in progress), a new film project that weaves together individual, political, and biological responses to a world facing the epoch-defining crisis of climate change. The images in Henrot’s film conjure the experience of walking on a tightrope: an effort to provide care or aid (to cross), also must navigate the looming threat of causing harm (not falling). Is the human behind the latex-gloved hands that hold the tiny, prehistoric creature going to succeed in helping the animal? Or is this intervention interrupting its delicate survival? How is a society that has for centuries caused harm to the planet (unknowingly?) going to unlearn these destructive patterns and relearn how to care for it?

“We don’t really have a language to describe the pain of witnessing the death of ecosystems and other species,” reflects Dr. Jennifer Atkinson, a professor of environmental humanities who specializes in the global mental health crisis arising from climate disruption, “Displaced communities, vanishing forests, collapsing glaciers. We don’t live in a culture that openly mourns those kinds of losses, processes their magnitude or personal impact.”^[1] A recording of this text by Dr. Atkinson provides a voiceover in Henrot’s film, as the professor introduces the concept of the staggering emotional burden due to climate change’s existential threat (otherwise known as ecological grief or eco-grief), which often leaves people in paralysis.

According to Henrot, “accepting the loss of the world we knew as children, like the loss of our childhood itself, is a necessary developmental step of maturation in the current ecological context. But unlike a simple and definitive expulsion from Eden, we return to a child-like level of learning: the ABCS of zero-waste, the multiplication tables of carbon neutrality, the conjugation of biodiversity protections.”^[2] In The Veins gets intimate with what it means to navigate a kind of societal coming of age and the sticky, messy, awkward moments of collective transmutation that we must undergo in order to survive. In her proposal for the piece, Henrot quotes feminist theorist Donna Haraway from her influential book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene: “Unlike inhabitants in many other utopian movements, stories, or literatures in the history of the earth, the Children of Compost knew they could not deceive themselves that they could start from scratch. Precisely the opposite insight moved them; they asked and responded to the question of how to live in the ruins that were still inhabited, with ghosts and with the living too.”^[3] Like Haraway’s ‘Children of Compost,’ Henrot knows that our children must contend with the threat of mass extinction from birth.

A watercolor by Henrot sums up this predicament quite succinctly. In I Need You (2020), a pregnant figure looks down at its own belly. The being contained within—part tiny human, part growing plant—gazes back at its parent with an angry stare and pointed finger as if to say: “It’s your fault! Do something!” Henrot achieves this powerful, metaphorical message with an economy of hand-drawn line. Here, the reciprocal relationship between parent and child/plant troubles the idea that we are self-contained individuals, disconnected from the rest of the living world. It also reveals an urgent yet fundamental need to change—to revise ingrained notions that we are divided from the Earth, and from each other. In her work, Henrot poses questions of responsibility. What does it mean, for example, to be faced with the reality of ecological collapse on an individual level as well as a societal one? Her works ponder the multiple predicaments of how to adapt as temperatures rise, species die, and systems beg to be revised; and furthermore, how to let go of human desires to control, to own, to preserve, to be fixed, to be immortal.

Henrot’s interest in questioning the very impetus of these human impulses to categorize and systematize the world around us, has been a theme throughout her oeuvre, notably in her breakthrough 2013 video, Grosse Fatigue. This 13-minute piece interweaves origin stories of the universe across cultures in a spoken-word style voiceover by multidisciplinary artist Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh, which Henrot composed with poet and frequent collaborator Jacob Bromberg. Concurrently throughout, and at a dizzying pace, a density of images pop up as browser-style windows on a computer desktop. The video was the culmination of a residency at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., in which the artist took inspiration from the many objects and specimens held in the collections of the National Museum of Natural History. While working on the video, Henrot perceived “no opposition between myth and science,” however she did identify an opposition between “oral and written culture.” As she has described, “Western written culture has built its way of working on destruction—there is a need to kill things to conserve them, as opposed to a culture that does not set things in stone, but sustains itself orally.”^[4] From the vastness of universal creation to the intimacy of a smartphone screen in the palm of a hand, Grosse Fatigue, like many of Henrot’s works, speaks to the futility of unifying or solidifying any system of knowledge.

The artist has recounted that her video was built on a Google search—representing a more contemporary mode of epistemological classification than the Smithsonian’s archive, but perhaps the result of a kindred information thirst (or addiction?). Henrot’s subsequent series of Interphones (2015–17) likewise explore varying forms of dependence—from childlike feelings of powerlessness to individual reliance on smartphones to systemic attachments in societal relationships to governments. Built in varying shapes and pops of pastel colors, Henrot’s interactive Interphones have a seductive quality to them, making them hard to resist touching. They might evoke adult versions of a child’s toy such as a shape sorter, abacus, or bead maze (objects that have also long-fascinated the artist and the subject of numerous bronze sculptures such as Misfits, 2022, or 347/743 (Abacus), 2023).

The conflation between familial hierarchy and technological dependency was the basis for Interphones, which greeted viewers upon entering her 2015 exhibition, Bad Dad, at New York’s Metro Pictures gallery. Those who pick up and listen to the receivers are invited to press buttons as they respond to various prompts. Each ‘phone’ has a different script, also created in collaboration with Bromberg, addressing a wide range of subjects: How to diagnose an abusive father or failed internet connection; how to know if your partner is cheating on you; or how to cope with an aggressive dog. In the banana-yellow, ear-shaped Bad Dad & Beyond (2015), for example, a hotline asks listeners to respond ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to various questions while a small video component scrolls YouTube clips documenting episodes of police brutality. Prompts such as “Does he fear loss of control and freeze up when you have several programs running?” or “Does he make promises and then delete them from his memory?” lead to conclusions such as “Try restarting him. If this doesn’t work, explicitly threaten to abandon him. Goodbye.”

In conflating the languages of technological failure and parental shortcomings, Bad Dad & Beyond gets to the core of a child-like frustration that rises from relationships of powerlessness—whether they come from within our own family structures, from the archaic systems of institutional bureaucracy, or from troubles connecting to WiFi. Following Interphones, in subsequent rooms of the exhibition, a suite of Henrot’s whimsical watercolors was displayed. These included Sad Dad (2015), in which a seemingly exhausted figure of a man with the head of an egret and an incongruously erect penis leads a tiny smiling child along for a walk; and Killing Time (2015), where a suited fellow wearing a bright red watch and glued to a phone consumes an infant while crying.

Years later, one year after giving birth to her first child Iddu, Henrot started the drawing series, Not Clean Yet (2019–20). The series explores multi-faceted concepts of “going clean,” from the relatively insignificant (dealing with a toddler’s mess or quitting smoking) to the globally ambitious (reducing carbon emissions or attempting to reverse environmental devastation caused by corporate greed). Her drawings in this series typically meld the trivial with the consequential: A group of disappointed children gaze down at a man who has just crapped his pants while playing with a toy plane and blocks emblazoned with dollar signs (Who Will Clean Up After Him?, 2020); or a planet burns as one figure covers their eyes and another stares hypnotized at a screen while sipping out of a single-use plastic container (Blinded, 2020). Here Henrot takes direct aim at our patriarchal society’s distorted notions of productivity, and its resistance to hearing the next generation’s urgent calls for remediation and change.

Henrot’s work has long-attested that the patriarchal legacy of the artist as singular genius, or even the illusion that we, as humans, are impenetrable machines, separated from the rest of the world, is increasingly becoming obsolete. In fact, American developmental biologist and historian Scott F. Gilbert noted that “Twenty-first-century biology is fundamentally different from twentieth-century biology. It is a biology of relationships rather than entities. The biology of anatomic individualism that had been the basis of genetics, anatomy, physiology, evolution, developmental biology, and immunology has been shown to be, at best, a weak first approximation of nature.”^[5] Recent studies have shown that during pregnancy, cells are exchanged between the mother and fetus via the placenta.^[6] After birth, not only does a child carry the cells of its parent, but some of the child’s cells remain in the parent’s body. This cellular invasion is known by biologists as microchimerism (‘chimera’ meaning an organism containing cells from two or more individuals). The term chimera in biology is actually derived from the name of a fire-breathing she-monster in Greek mythology with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail, which also sounds like something out of a drawing by Camille Henrot, whose work characteristically depicts hybrid creatures.^[7] Geneticist Diana Bianchi describes the effects of microchimerism as “a permanent connection which contributes to the survival of both individuals.”^[8] Perhaps, a society paralyzed by climate grief can learn a thing or two from becoming chimera. As the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva writes, “If pregnancy is the threshold between nature and culture, motherhood is the bridge between the singular and the ethical.”^[9]

The title In The Veins was inspired by a quiet moment when Henrot was nursing her child and noticed the veins on his eyelid—those fragile yet powerful tiny venules pumping blood from the heart throughout the circulatory system to keep the body alive.^[10] Their shapes also resemble the roots or branches of trees, the tentacles of coral, the fronds of algae—the rhizomatic networks that sustain life and connect all living things. In the trailer for Henrot’s film, a child sings a popular French song for children, “Au Feu Les Pompiers.” These lyrics translate to:

Fire! Firemen, fire!
The house is burning.
Fire! Firemen, fire!
The house burned down.
It’s not me who burned it down,
It’s Mrs. Chef,
It’s not me who burned it down,
It’s Mr. Chef.

The song has resonance with the urgent messages on protest signs such as those Henrot saw at a demonstration in Liverpool organized by the Fridays for Future international youth movement, speaking out against the lack of action on the climate crisis.^[11] Their signs read: “If you don’t act like adults, we will,” “System change, not climate change,” and the simple and exasperated “Seriously!” Their exhortations to action express their fervent hopes for ending the inertia of generations of decision-makers who remain paralyzed—whether by eco-grief or patriarchal individualism, or stasis within the familiar, repetitive patterns of the past. As any parent of a toddler knows, metamorphosis is a messy business—whether it be potty training or collective transformation. Change implies persistent attention. As Henrot has justly concluded, “Facing loss, accepting self-discipline, resigning some joys and prioritizing common sense over improvised wants and desires, is then, in some sense, similar to coming of age.”^[12]